SEO Tools Your Business Should Be Using: Interview With Brian McDowell

In an interview conducted at Pubcon 2013 in Las Vegas, Brian McDowell of Conductor shares some recommendations for SEO tools that your business should be using.

If your businesses is managing its SEO in-house there are tools available to do the job more efficiently. With the sheer number of tools available it’s easy to get overwhelmed, which may leave you unsure of where to start.

Conductor Searchlight will help you cut through the noise by providing recommendations of tools that can help you get the most out of your SEO efforts.

Hear what Brian has to say in the video below:

Here are some key takeaways from the video:

Since every business is unique, Brian recommends first taking a look at your organizational structure to see what resources you have available.

Identify who you need to build reports for, how you need to look at the back end of your system, and how you can automate some of the marketing on the front end.

Conductor Searchlight (Enterprise SEO Platform) is awesome and how businesses can use it!

Brian recommends Screaming Frog as an audit tool. If you’re having issues with your sitemap that Google is warning you about, one of the things you can do with Screaming Frog is submit an XML sitemap to identify the specific issues.

Screaming Frog can also help you identify that all 301 redirects have been implemented properly during a site migration.

You also need to make sure you have a good reporting platform, Brian says, because all departments of your organization need different reports on how they’re managing SEO.

Brian also recommends a project management tracking system. A lot of people use Jira, but there are a lot of alternatives available as well.

Above all, Brian recommends developing a relationship with your site engineers and educating them on SEO best practices so they can be built right into your site going forward.

If you have any questions after watching the video, for either myself or Brian, ask them in the comments section and we will do our best to respond to everyone! Please visit SEJ’s YouTube page for more video interviews from Pubcon 2013.